Here’s a metaphysical riddle for you: If a minor league basketball team earns a 30-20 record, wins its division, gets through the league semifinals, and makes it all the way to the championship round before losing a hard-fought three-game series and no one notices … did the season really happen?
I only ask because that’s how the Austin Toros‘ third season played out, and still I can’t shake the feeling that no one noticed; that the Toros occupy a strange, existential negative space at the edge of the city’s cultural landscape; that they toil unheard, unseen, and unacknowledged; that most people in town don’t even know they exist.
It’s not really a feeling, actually, more like an admission of reality. Twenty-five times a season, the Toros play at the Austin Convention Center, and 25 times a season, attendance is … uninspiring. I remember one night last year when it felt like an entire game was being played just for me. I would have been grateful if I hadn’t been so depressed.
The situation doesn’t really make any sense. First of all, Austin is a town that loves celebrating itself. Even the smallest crafts fair or lousiest experimental-theatre festival is well-attended and trumpeted as evidence of the city’s idiosyncratic charm. So why the disregard for the Toros? What, after all, could be more idiosyncratic than minor league sports?
Second of all, Austin loves basketball; just look at all the attention lavished on the UT men’s team the last few years. And yet when you tell Longhorn fans their city is home to an NBA Development League franchise, they look at you with complete indifference. I don’t get it: Why bother with a game played by college kids, most of whom will never see the inside of a pro stadium without a ticket, when you can watch athletes who are actually good enough to get paid for what they do? It’s like choosing the school cafeteria over P.F. Chang’s or a collection of undergraduate short films over a night with Jim Jarmusch.
Third of all, the Toros are good. Really good. They’re runners-up to the national title. They have future NBA starters on their roster. Attention must be paid. In that spirit, and in honor of the start of the team’s fourth season, I humbly offer these four reasons to jump on the Toros bandwagon:
1) Carldell Johnson – Forget stats for a second; diminutive point guard Carldell Johnson’s nickname is “Squeaky,” which automatically puts him in the running for league MVP.
2) Exposure to Small-Town America – Nearly every time the Toros play, they’ll be facing a team from some tiny Midwestern hamlet you’ve never heard of that is rich in history, deep into a postindustrial economic collapse, and ravaged by a methamphetamine epidemic.
3) In-Game Promotional Contests – If watching professional basketball teams vie against one another doesn’t satisfy your desire for competition, surely the sight of two overweight kids on tricycles racing to win their family’s weekly grocery allowance will.
4) The Capital City Dancers – Fifteen lovely and talented young women in spandex who can, with the sway of a hip, make you forget that your team is down by 20 points, that there are only 400 people in the crowd, and that you just spent $7 on a pretzel.
This article appears in December 5 • 2008.